The development of the AB-CHAIN advertising network during the Tokensale period

The development of AB-CHAIN as a product began at the end of 2017, at the very time when we were preparing for the main Tokensale. We began with the development of a publisher’s cabinet, in order to attract partners on whose websites we could show the banners of our advertisers, as well as our own, during the period of the main Tokensale.

By the end of 2017, we were able to provide about 50,000 banner impressions per day, and even attracted the first advertisers with whom we worked without an advertising cabinet, while the launch of advertising campaigns was carried out manually by our programmers on a per-case basis.

On the one hand, we ended 2017 with a feeling of joy for the speed of product development and with frustration in regard to the negative economy on the other (the capacity of publishers needed to be matched, and we did not have so many advertisers).

Since the beginning of 2018, we continued to connect publishers and attract advertisers, and we also actively used the power of our advertising network for our Tokensale promo. It should be noted that in February, we already started feeling the effect of the traffic we received from our publishers, since the quality of clicks was high — users spent more than 3 minutes on our site.

At some moment we noticed that traffic quality from our advertising network decreased dramatically and it became clear that several publishers with fake traffic joined our network. To combat this, we implemented a fraud protection research mechanism, as a result of which an approach was developed and a network of bot sites from dozens of individual publishers connected to AB-CHAIN was excluded, returning traffic quality to the previous high level.

By the end of March 2018, we were able to provide about 100,000 banner displays for advertisers per day, and also managed to work with 6-8 clients.

Post-Tokensale. Active work and growth

Since the beginning of April 2018, we began to move into an active stage of sales and product development. We updated our website, developed the first version of the advertiser’s office, prepared the necessary advertising materials and began to participate in events from as sponsors, conducting various promotions. We also actively attracted traffic to the site, purchasing traffic at target sites and publishing articles. As a result, the number of advertisers began to increase, and we had an average of 2-3 new customers per week.

In parallel with the development of the advertising network, we were engaged in the selection of exchanges for RTB token listing. Selecting an exchange for listing is not an easy task because:

Listing on such exchanges can cost upwards of $100,000, which raises concerns that funds will be wasted, given the fake trading volumes;

You need to plan a promotional campaign together with the listing of the token on the exchange, preferably in partnership with the exchange itself. Such negotiations can be delayed, since we are talking about large sums of money and everyone wants to get the absolutely best deal.

We meticulously approached the selection and IDEX became the first exchange to list RTB.

Nothing foreshadowed trouble, but the ETH rate in April collapsed and reached the lower limit of $370/1 ETH. As you can see, the funds raised during the Tokensale have decreased dramatically. Within 2 weeks our budget decreased by more than 2.5 times due to the collapse of the ETH rate. The process of product development and listing was already underway, and we decided not to stop our work, believing that the rate would soon return to normal. Indeed, in early May, the rate rose up to $ 750/1 ETH, which gave us confidence that we are moving in the right direction.

We were very enthusiastic about attracting advertisers and put a lot of effort into this area. 80% of our clients were ICO projects, but new segments began to emerge — marketing agencies which provideed services to ICO projects. The peak of our activity came at the end of May, the beginning of June, 2019. At this time 5-6 clients could be simultaneously serviced by AB-CHAIN.

Difficulties

Since July 2018, there has been an outflow of advertisers, old customers have stopped buying advertising. New advertisers began to come not so willingly as before, although we did not weaken promotions and participation in events at all, having visited Paris for this purpose. We also tried to strengthen customers’ trust in us by sharing information about the companies we were able to work with.

Understanding that we already had good volumes of publishers — about 500,000 impressions per day, we began to attract advertisers even more vigorously. At the same time, additional functionality was developed in the advertising network, which allowed launching retargeting and look-a-like advertising campaigns. It is logical that due to the introduction of new mechanics in the advertising network, there was a drawdown in the development of a roadmap product, namely, the development of a smart contract for advertising deals was deliberately shifted to attract new advertisers and provide them with quality service.

In parallel with the product development and sales, we were listed on the second exchange — LiveCoin. This allowed us to enter the Coinmarketcap rating and increase the daily turnover of the RTB token.

Since the middle of August 2018, ETH rate has dropped below $300 and funds raised on tokensale have decreased by 3 times, considering that we were still actively investing in product development, promotions and listing on exchanges. This had a negative impact on attracting new advertisers: the cost of participation at a conference starts from $5000 (in reality, usually more than $10,000). As a result we would receive, at best, two advertisers with an average check of $1500. It was at that moment that we started fearing that in such market conditions our project might soon cease to exist, as it was not possible to work with a positive unit-economy.

Attempts to reanimate AB-CHAIN

Realizing that it is no longer possible to move using previously tried and tested methods, we returned to the development of a smart contract for advertising deals. The trading volumes of the RTB token regularly overcame the mark of $ 100,000 per day, which gave hope that a good discount of 50% would encourage advertisers to buy banner ads from us.

Unfortunately, our hypothesis was not justified, because after the publication of the news about the smart contract launch and the possibility of paying for advertising in RTB with a 50% discount, we received few advertisers with small budgets and a lack of prospects for further cooperation with the new clients.

By September-October 2018, the ETH rate continued its decline and had not risen above $300 for a long time. Over the past 6 months, we have seriously invested in product development, customer acquisition and exchange listing, so such a low ETH rate did not allow us to look to the future optimistically.

We began reducing the activity of attracting new advertisers, since during the lifespan of the project we had a chance to communicate with over 1500 potential clients, and new projects began to enter the market less and less. What’s worse, the potential of AB-CHAIN was uninteresting for new projects.

At the end of 2018, it became clear that the development of AB-CHAIN as a business in the existing conditions is impossible for us. Nevertheless, following a suggestion of one of our advisors, we decided to wait, hoping that the market will survive the decline and conditions will begin to improve. By February 2019, the market conditions have not recovered, and we began to prepare for the closure of the project.

Summary

During our working on AB-CHAIN we have come a long and difficult way. We achieved the following roadmap milestones:

Released the AB-CHAIN platform for first advertisers (ICO companies). Prepared cabinets for publishers and advertisers. Worked with dozens of projects;

Launched the RTB token and token burning mechanism;

Developed the Smart contract for advertising deals.

The main reasons of our failure, in our opinion are:

Reduction of our main client segment — ICO projects;

The reluctance of ICO projects to invest in banner advertising;

The sharp decline of the ETH rate throughout 2018 (the cost of 1 ETH reached $1,200 at the beginning of the year, and did not rise above $300 at the end of the year), at the time of project closure, the rate was less than $150.

From the very beginning of the AB-CHAIN project, we have shown our openness and decency; therefore, we see no reason to financially invest in the development of the project further, burning the money of our investors for nothing. Therefore, we will return the remaining funds to our investors.

All investors will receive a personal email from AB-CHAIN, which will describe the refund procedure.

Thank you for believing in us, we sincere regret for not meeting your expectations.